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In a context of institutionalized regulation and academic framing determined by agency theory, we note paradoxes in board governance literature and practice. These paradoxes concern boards’ conflicting roles of monitoring/control, and innovation/strategy-making. We explore directors’ mind-sets about governance on which their resolution of paradoxes and their decisions and actions will be based. We do this by applying discourse analysis to the transcripts of 60 semistructured interviews conducted with New Zealand directors who described and evaluated their experience of board governance. We identify and discuss their various discourses, which we label discourses of conformance, of deliberation, of enterprise and of bounded innovation. We note the homogeneity of discourses across different organization types, the dominance of conformance, the nonresolution of paradoxes, and the likely effects in inhibiting board strategy-making and contribution to innovation. We recommend attention by boards to their mind-sets and processes, and the development of generativity.

Graph normal form, GNF, [1], was used in [2, 3] for analyzing paradoxes in propositional discourses, with the semantics—equivalent to the classical one—defined by kernels of digraphs. The paper presents infinitary, resolution-based reasoning with GNF theories, which is refutationally complete for the classical semantics. Used for direct (not refutational) deduction it is not explosive and allows to identify in an inconsistent discourse, a maximal consistent subdiscourse with its classical consequences. Semikernels, generalizing kernels, provide the semantic interpretation.

The paradox that appears under Burali–Forti’s name in many textbooks of set theory is a clever piece of reasoning leading to an unproblematic theorem. The theorem asserts that the ordinals do not form a set. For such a set would be–absurdly–an ordinal greater than any ordinal in the set of all ordinals. In this article, we argue that the paradox of Burali–Forti is first and foremost a problem about concept formation by abstraction, not about sets. We contend, furthermore, that some hundred years after its discovery the paradox is still without any fully satisfactory resolution. A survey of the current literature reveals one key assumption of the paradox that has gone unquestioned, namely the assumption that ordinals are objects. Taking the lead from Russell’s no class theory, we interpret talk of ordinals as an efficient way of conveying higher-order logical truths. The resulting theory of ordinals is formally adequate to standard intuitions about ordinals, expresses a conception of ordinal number capable of resolving Burali–Forti’s paradox, and offers a novel contribution to the longstanding program of reducing mathematics to higher-order logic.

In this article I examine ordinary ethical practices that underpin intimate relations in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. I focus ethnographically on jealousy and seduction as complementary forms of play, which simultaneously affirm and challenge such aspects of emotional relatedness as trust and love. I argue that since a measure of concealment is inherent in both these play-forms, they render invisible those actions that challenge conventional moral injunctions, such as sexual infidelity. I consequently offer an ethnographic theory of ‘invisibility’ by which opacity, uncertainty and paradox become intrinsic to the emergence of intimate relations as ethical practices in their own right.

Is it possible for Suzy to travel back in time and kill her infant self? Vihvelin (1996) and Vranas (2009) hold that autoinfanticide is logically/metaphysically possible but physically impossible. Horacek (2005) believes that autoinfanticide has a nonzero chance of occurring and so is physically possible, but believes that autoinfanticide is metaphysically impossible. To sort out these issues, I describe six ways to commit autoinfanticide; for all six, there is a case to be made for their physical and metaphysical possibility.

In this article I propose a Yin Yang perspective to understand culture. Based on the indigenous Chinese philosophy of Yin Yang, I conceptualize culture as possessing inherently paradoxical value orientations, thereby enabling it to embrace opposite traits of any given cultural dimension. I posit that potential paradoxical values coexist in any culture; they give rise to, exist within, reinforce, and complement each other to shape the holistic, dynamic, and dialectical nature of culture. Seen from the Yin Yang perspective, all cultures share the same potential in value orientations, but at the same time they are also different from each other because each culture is a unique dynamic portfolio of self-selected globally available value orientations as a consequence of that culture's all-dimensional learning over time.

This essay deals with the findings of an ethnographic study carried out in two urban neighborhoods in Germany. Although the German residents felt bound by the norms of ethnic equality, they used negative classifications to stigmatize upwardly mobile members of the Turkish community. In doing so, they undermined these equality norms without explicitly calling them into question. This paradox can be explained by a latently active, primordial belief in kinship, which is ultimately rooted in a symbolic order of ethnic inequality.

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